What is going on in Herr Weiss' class?

Posts tagged ‘german’

With all of the absences and fieldtrips that have been happening since the start of this unit I am putting all of the information of what you may have missed up on my blog. You are responsible for turning in what is assigned – even if you are not present on a school day.

Students were presented with a short biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – what the literary movement of Sturm und Drang was about, a short discussion about Faust, his relationship with Friedrich Schiller, his time in Jena and Weimar (and why this is of particular interest to me – having studied in Jena at the Freidrich Schiller Universität.)

Next working in pairs we figured out who the four “speakers” of the poem were and lightly colored in the lines they spoke to make a graphic organizer of who was speaking when in the poem.

We watched some videos depicting the poem and compared them to our pictures in our head of what we thought was going on

Students made single stick figure depictions of what was happening in each quatrain on the Erlkönig poem.

We watched/listened to a modern interpretation of the poem by the heavy metal group, Rammstein called Dalai Llama. We completed a Venn diagram of the Rammstein song, the Goethe Poem and the Schubert composition

Read the text and listen to the song “Dalai Lama” by Rammstein and compare/contrast the song, the poem by Goethe, and the composition by Schubert in the Venn diagram in your packet.

Students created a poem of their own, on any topic of their choosing in German. There were four types – descriptions are outlined in your packet on how to complete them – cinquain, word picture, and haiku, acrostic. This was completed in class and decorated on “fancy” paper.

The final unit assignment/project was to choose one of the following interpretative assignment options

Perform a reading of the poem, auf Deutsch, set to music of your choice that is appropriate to the mood and theme of the poem.

Create a collage or other piece of visual art (must be at least 11” x 14” in size) including the text of the poem and images/decorations that interpret the poem.

Create a Powerpoint or video, animated or live action, in which you include the words of the poem and images to accompany it. If you want to have music accompaniment you may.

Rewrite the poem (auf denglisch – that is using what you CAN say in German and what you can’t in English! There needs to be a good mix!) telling the same story but in a different means. See the example

Today we began using the verb schenken to describe giving gifts to people.

it is a regular verb weak verb and follows the normal verb conjugation rules:

Ich schenke

Du schenkst

Er, sie, es schenkt

Wir schenken

Ihr schenkt

Sie, sie schenken

Important Tip Remember in Geman:

das Gift ≠ the gift

das gift =

das Geschenk =

Unless you really want to with something

But that’s totally up to you!

Now that we have the “false friends” cleared up with a very important word that is NOT a cognate, we have to know that the verb we are focusing on this chapter takes TWO different objects!! Yup that’s right – a direct object and an indirect object. To find out what they are keep reading!

We started out by making a list of words in a varied KWL Chart like this:

Was kann ich sagen? – das Auto, das Buch, und so weiter

Was möchte ich sagen? – things students would like to have as gifts.

Was muss ich lernen? – what do they need to know – necessarily for the chapter.

A photo of the words we came up with will be attached to this blog post.

Now here are the grammar charts we used today:

“der” words

r

e

s

e

n

e

s

e

m

r

m

n

Masculine

Feminine

Neuter

Plural

“ein” words

X

e

X

e

n

e

X

e

m

r

m

n

Masculine

Feminine

Neuter

Plural

These charts show the endings on all the “der” words and all the “ein” words (like mein, dein, kein, sein, all the possessive pronouns etc….)

The first row is for the nominative case – or the subject of the sentence

The second row is for the accusative case – or the direct object of the sentence

The third row is for the dative case – or the indirect object of the sentence

A fun way to practice your pronunciation in any language is to try and say tongue twisters! It’s even better with more than one person because you can laugh at all the mistakes that you hear and mispronunciations that you make! Take some time and listen to the vokis that I made for each of these and take your best shot at pronouncing them! Make a video or recording of yourself to see how you are doing – if you are doing them alone! You can even post yourself saying them here in the comments from youtube or through audiowith such things as audacity or another audio program.

This tense is used in spoken and written German to express something that happened in the past.

Just like in English, it is composed of a helping verb(in German they are haben or sein) and apast participle of the verb you are trying to make into the past.

The helping verb is the only one conjugated!

Examples:

I haveplayedsoccer.

Ich habe Fußball gespielt.

I have drivento school.

Ich binzur Schule gefahren.

You should already know how to conjugate the helping verbs that we are going to need to make the past tense but here they are:

haben

sein

ich

habe

wir

haben

ich

bin

wir

sind

du

hast

Ihr

habt

du

bist

ihr

seid

er,sie,es

hat

Sie, sie

haben

er,sie,es

ist

Sie,sie

sind

Since there are two different helping verb options that can be used in German there are some rules so that you know which is the right choice!

sein is used ONLY in 3 circumstances:

a. with sein

b. movement (that will take you from point A to B)

c. a change in state (ie: birth, death, awake, asleep)

Haben is used in all other circumstances

Now that we have the background on how helping verbs work in conjunction with the Perfekt tense let’s focus on the verbs themselves!

There are 4 categories of verbs that we are going to discuss:

weak verbs

strong verbs

verbs that end in “ieren”

verbs with seperable prefixes

The first rule is that we need to isolate the “stem” of the verb, if the last letter of the stem is a “t”, “d” or “consonant +n” – example: arbeiten, wandern, regnen – than you will need to KEEP THE “E”

Weak Verbs:

– these verbs are ones that follow the normal conjugation rules

– are put into the past tense by adding “ge” in front of the stem and “t” after the stem.

How do you do this?

1) take the infinitive

machen (make, do)

2) remove the

-en

suffix

mach

3) replace it with the

–t

suffix

macht

4) add

ge–

prefix

gemacht

Examples:

machen = gemacht

kaufen = gekauft

spielen = gespielt

brauchen = gebraucht

arbeiten = gearbeitet

suchen = gesucht

Example sentences:

lernen: Ich habe das ganze Wochenende Deutsch gelernt.

wohnen: Du hast in der Türkei gewohnt.

leben: Er hat lange in Amerika gelebt.

lieben: Sie hat ihre Kinder sehr geliebt.

heiraten: Wir haben 1979 geheiratet.

baden: Ihr habt im See gebadet.

grillen: Sie haben Bratwurstchen gegrillt.

Strong Verbs:

– these verbs are ones that break the normal conjugation rules with exceptions such as stem changes

– are put into the past tense by adding “ge” in front of the infinitive verb.

Examples:

lesen = gelesen

gehen = gegangen

fahren = gefahren

essen = gegessen

sehen = gesehen

kommen = gekommen

fressen = gefressen

sein = gewesen

“ieren” Verbs

– these verbs are the ones that end with “ieren”.

– Verbs that have this ending tend to be very similar to English. And they’re all regular verbs, so they don’t require a change to the stem in conjugations.

– are put into the past tense by simply changing the ending to “t”.

– NO ‘ge’ is added.

Examples:

imitieren = imitiert

diskutieren = diskutiert

spazieren = spaziert

reparieren = repariert

fotografieren = fotografiert

studieren = studiert

Verbs with a Separable Prefix

– The past participal is formed by inserting the “ge” between the separable prefix and the rest of the verb.

This topic deals with conjunctions, words that combine two words, phrases, clauses and sentences. There are two types coordinating – or ones that can stand alone and subordinating – a phrase using one of these needs the first clause for it to make sense.

Coordinating Conjunctions

I am only going to give the basic four conjunctions that are most often used by beginning German speakers. When you combine two sentences or clauses using them there is no change in word order once you have combined the two.

They are:

und – and

oder – or

aber – but

denn – because

Here is a little rhyme for you: Und, oder, aber, denn – verb does not come at the end!

Here are some examples:

Ich spiele Basketball und ich bin ein guter Basketballspieler!

Ich kann heute segeln oder Schach spielen.

Ich gehe nicht ins Kino denn ich habe Hausaufgaben.

Try seeing if you can find which coordinating conjunction goes in the blank!

Usage of "aber": "Today we have Mr. Mertens as our guest, who for the past 17 years has had to sneeze, but cannot. Mr. Mertens when did this all start? Mr. Mertens? Mr. Mertens?

Here is a video to explain both:Subordinating Conjunctions

Here is a “rap” video on how they work in English!

Subordinating conjunctions rely on the first clause for the second clause to make any sense! In German the word order CHANGES! The verb in the second clause will now come at the end! Four of the most popular subordinating conjunctions for beginning German learners are:

dass – that/so that

weil – because

ob – if

wenn – if/when

Here is a rhyme for these four: Dass, weil, ob, wenn – verb is at the end!

Like this:

The imperative in German is used when issuing a command to someone or more than one person. In English we use the you understood rule; Go home! or Shut the door! or Shut up! (I don’t have you in those phrases but you know I’m talking to YOU) This works the same way for the most part in German. At the bottom of this post there are links to online practice, videos and websites with more explanation!

Check out this awesomely made video by some German students!

First the verb is alwaysin the first position of the sentence!

Second are you talking to one person or more than one person or do you need to be formal?

Next the “formula” for creating a command is in the following table under which pronoun you are using.

Things to remember:

Make sure you are aware if the verb is a stem changing verb, ex geben – du gibst or lesen – du liest, if so you need to change it! Stem changing verbs only change when you are using du, er, sie or es FYI 🙂